~ Articles, letters, thoughts, etc.

Monthly Archives: January 2016

A few days ago I received an unusual email. It came from someone I had never met, but whom I knew was the person who was looking after an old friend from long ago. In the mail I was informed that Inge was bedridden, near to death, unable to speak but still able to hear, and would appreciate it if I phoned her to say a few words of farewell, encouragement and appreciation. She had no relatives and she had expressed the wish not to leave this world attended only by paid attendants.

I first met Inge in 1983. Yigal was doing post-doctoral work in experimental physics at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. The physics professor who was considered a leader in the field had moved to that mid-western city because of his asthma and other allergies. And so, while other Israeli post-doctoral candidates were going to exciting places like California or Washington D.C., the Shefer family found itself in the geographical centre of America, in a place where the summers are tropical, the winters arctic and the interim seasons awash with tornadoes and thunderstorms.

But there were some consolations, mainly the kind and generous people we encountered there, and Inge was among them. She worked in the administrative office of the university’s Physics Department, and immediately took a shine to the young man from Israel who was trying to find his way through the labyrinthine formalities of the university’s bureaucracy. She immediately established contact with Yigal, and they soon found they had many interests in common.

Inge was born in the international city of Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland) in 1922 and managed to leave Europe with her mother before WWII to reach the USA. She lived and worked in New York for several years, but later moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where she met and married Peter Worth, who was Professor of Art and Art History at the university. She continued to return to New York several times a year in order to care for her mother, who refused to leave the city.

Working as a secretary in the Physics Department, Inge was able to exercise her mastery of several European languages, as well as her excellent command of English, which she spoke almost without any trace of an accent. She was a true intellectual, a voracious reader, a devotee of classical music as well as a connoisseur of art (hardly surprising considering her husband’s occupation). She was on the committee that was instrumental in establishing a series of chamber music concerts in Lincoln. We attended as many of these as possible, and I remember one extraordinary event, when Alicia de Larrocha played Albéniz’s “Iberia,” Granados’s “Goyescas” and de Falla’s “Nights in the Gardens of Spain.” Luckily for us, Lincoln was a convenient overnight stop for many world-class artists who were booked to play on both the West and East coasts.

After we returned to Israel we corresponded with Inge on a regular basis. She was a conscientious letter-writer, and her neatly-typed letters recounting events in Lincoln and describing her travels, were always a welcome sight in our mailbox. Many of them also contained newspaper cuttings that she felt would be of interest or relevance to us. In later years, with declining health, she could no longer type her letters but wrote them in her small, but very neat, clear handwriting.

Together with Peter, who died in 2010, Inge travelled extensively, both in the USA and abroad, acquiring friends all over the world. She visited us in Israel in 1988 and took as many tours as she could crowd into her short stay, not allowing her age or her failing health to hold her back. Eventually, the frequency with which her letters arrived became slower, and eventually she wrote to tell us that she had sold her home and moved into sheltered accommodation. Then there was silence for a few years, until a few days ago, when I received the mail from her carer, Mary George-Pruitt.

Almost immediately after receiving that request, I picked up the phone and called the number I’d been given, spoke into the receiver for about five minutes, reminiscing about our time in Lincoln, our subsequent meetings and our mutual love of books, art and music.

From Mary, the carer who had written to me, I received the following mail:

“She received your call from Israel, a call from Heidi in Guatemala, a call from her friends in Germany, a call from her friends in Brazil. And at least half of the states had someone calling reflecting a story, sharing a memory and letting her know she was loved. There was some love, laughter, reminiscing. You connected with her soul…”

And then the next day:

“Peace came, The day all of her friends spoke with her allowed her to pass from this life knowing she was well loved and thought of. She was very peaceful when she took her last breath at 5:05 on Sunday January 24, 2015.”

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I know I’ve written before about Verdi’s Requiem, the role it played in my childhood and musical education in general, about the impression made on me when I read of its performance by prisoners in Theresienstadt and finally being privileged to attend a performance of the reconstruction of that event here in Jerusalem. But I can’t help going back to its splendour and magnificence after hearing yet another live performance a few days ago, once again in Jerusalem.

The Henry Crown auditorium of the Jerusalem Theatre isn’t the best venue for hearing the performance in terms of acoustics, but to enter the hall and find the greatly augmented Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra and the two choirs sitting there, all arrayed in their uniforms (both women’s choirs all in black, both men’s choirs in white shirts, ties and dark trousers), waiting to start the performance, created a festive and inspiring atmosphere before even a single note was played.

When maestro Frederic Chaslin strode onto the stage and raised his baton the atmosphere was electric. The men’s choir began to sing in muted, pianissimo tones, imploring the deity to have mercy, forgive the dead their sins and grant them eternal rest. The music then swells into a full-throated prayer for deliverance. People say that listening to classical music in the comfort of their home with a good sound system is as good as attending a live performance, but I couldn’t disagree with them more. Nothing beats being there in person, hearing all the nuances of the voices (provided they’re good, of course), and being physically and emotionally overwhelmed and swept away by the power of the music.

The choirs sing out at the tops of their voices, the trumpets blare and the whole orchestra gives its maximum in the Dies Irae (which recurs several times in the piece), producing a fortissimo that sends a shiver down every spine in the auditorium and brought tears to many eyes, mine included. The impact was something immense and incomparable. It really inspired a sense of dread and awe and, as we’re all aware, old Verdi knew a thing or two about achieving dramatic effect.

And that set my thoughts wandering. There’s a clear line that connects the Book of the Dead of ancient Egypt, the Jewish prayers and supplications of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) and the Christian requiem prayer. The Latin words, liber scriptum proferetur (the book of words is open), which feature in the requiem, echo the Jewish concept of God deciding who shall live and who shall die and writing it down in a book which is signed and sealed on Yom Kippur. I sometimes irreverently refer to this idea as ‘the Great Accountant in the Sky,’ but the concept is obviously one that has occupied humankind since time immemorial.

The Book of the Dead emerged in seventh century B.C.E. Egypt, when the culture of that country had already been in existence for several thousands of years. The concept underlying their religion was that life continued after death, and certain procedures, spells and rituals would ensure that this would indeed be the case. The Book of the Dead existed in many variations, but all were designed to ensure that the dead person would continue to enjoy the benefits of having lived an exemplary life.

So it might just be possible to regard the Christian requiem and the Jewish Yom Kippur ritual as just another series of prayers, incantations and rituals designed to ensure a happy hereafter for the person whose soul has passed on to that ‘bourne from which no traveller returns.’

Who knows, perhaps it might even help. But one thing is sure, the various requiems composed by such luminaries as Verdi, Berlioz, Mozart, Fauré and others continue to bring immense pleasure to the living.

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What is it about women’s hair that preoccupies people so much? There was a time when it was considered unseemly for a woman to be seen with her hair uncovered. Still today Queen Elizabeth is never seen without a hat, and presumably for a similar reason it is customary for women to wear hats to weddings, giving them an opportunity to throw decorum to the winds and place all manner of odd arrangements on their heads, as happened at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

But the requirement that a woman cover her hair was abandoned early on in the twentieth century, except in extremely conservative, even repressive, male-dominated societies, as we see with orthodox Jews and Muslims, for example. But in those societies any inch of exposed female skin is considered anathema, almost blasphemous, or some kind of insult to the heavenly agent that presumably created it

As a girl grows up her preoccupation with her hair grows too. And as she gets older still, and ‘silver threads among the gold’ start to appear, she comes to regard this as a stark betrayal of her desire to remain forever young. And thus it is that large numbers of women, this writer included, spend many hours and considerable sums of money in an effort to conceal the passage of time as revealed by the colour of their hair. There are, of course, many women who decline to colour their hair and allow the grey to take over completely. I tried this at one point, but was subjected to complaints from my grandchildren (granddaughters) that it made me look old, so gave in and returned to the hairdresser.

It’s at this point that the dilemma begins. What colour should the hair be? Nature’s way of revealing our age is not confined to our hair. Our figure and face also show the passage of time. And loth though we are to admit it, our overall appearance cannot retain its youthful freshness.

It matters not that when we were young our skin was smooth and our hair a sleek dark helmet or a coronet of auburn curls, as we reach the mid-century point our appearance has changed, sometimes even beyond recognition. Why, then, do some ladies seek to preserve the crow-black hair or auburn curls of their youth? Do they not see, when they look in the mirror, that a youthful crop of hair atop an old face is incongruous, even ridiculous?

Some women go to the other extreme and colour their hair a fierce orange colour. I have seen a few instances of this and find it difficult to understand why anyone should do it, and tend to think that the hairdresser must have miscalculated when preparing the dye. After all, we all know that hairdressing is not an exact science. It has occurred to me, though, that those ladies might actually be making a statement, a very bold one, at that, and although I don’t share their taste I cannot help admiring their courage.

I remember seeing an elderly neighbour who had left to spend a year abroad as a brunette and returned a blonde. Not long after that she let her hair revert to its natural state of grey, which suited her general appearance perfectly.

Oh, if only I had the courage to go blonde!

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So now ‘radical Islamist’ terror has spread to Paris, the centre of culture, civilization and enlightenment. Last January Paris was subjected to a similar heinous attack, but that was confined to targets that could be – and were – dismissed or defined as ‘appropriate,’ i.e., the offices of a satirical magazine that had lampooned Muhammed, and a kosher Jewish supermarket.

Of course, if Jews are the object of Muslim opprobrium, that is understandable. Palestine and all that. Of course, that’s also why Sunni and Shia Muslims are killing one another.

But enjoying the pleasures of modern life – eating, drinking, listening to music – what can possibly be wrong with that? If you subscribe to a certain version of the Muslim religion, and I’m being very careful to define it as such and not to tar all the adherents of that religion with the same brush, the answer is – a lot.

Equality of women, for a start. How can you tell whether a man is Muslim or not? By looking at his womenfolk. They are the ones who display the outward signs of their religion – at the very least it consists of a carefully-arranged headscarf, followed by the all-encompassing hijabs and burqas. Muslim men, on the other hand, dress just like their modern Western counterparts, with short-sleeved shirts and any casual wear that takes their fancy. Many more, and more severe, restrictions are imposed on women, ranging from general suppression to ‘honour killing,’ but you get the general idea.

While reaping the benefit of life in the West, those people abhor the free and easy lifestyle of its native population, with its liberal values and mores that can be defined as hedonistic. And what’s wrong with hedonism, as long as you’re not inflicting harm on anyone else? Some might even go so far as to say that we’ve been put on earth in order to enjoy ourselves, which is as good a definition of hedonism as any. But that, of course, is anathema to orthodox Islam.

Here in Israel the reaction of the population to what happened in Paris is confused and confusing. There are those who are consumed by satisfaction, shadenfreude,’ even a sense of divine retribution, noting that the plague that has afflicted this country on and off ever since its inception has extended its tentacles to other, supposedly ‘untouched’ parts of the world. But many Israelis, myself included, mourned for those caught up in the tragedy in Paris, shedding tears for the young lives lost so suddenly to blind and senseless hatred.

In a televised interview with Fox News, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch-American author and political activist, declared that it was time the world learned from Israel about maintaining security and dealing with terrorists. In the light of recent terrorist ‘successes’ in Israel that statement seems slightly problematic, but at least mass terror attacks of the kind recently seen in Paris no longer occur here.

One thing is clear, the Europe that we once knew, with its open borders and freedom of movement, will have to change in order to survive. Israel has long pursued a policy that involves strict control of those who may and may not enter the country, with a powerful security presence, whether seen or unseen, and it seems that the countries of Europe will henceforth have to adopt a similar approach. Only the paranoid survive, as Andy Grove of Intel declared in a different context.

Welcome to the world of the paranoid, Europe!

(This article first appeared in the January 2016 edition of the AJR Journal)